CSM Consumer versus User table in Higher Education

[Fadi Haddad]

We are working on CSM implementation for our university to be used by multiple departments to support our students, employees, and external users. We already have ITSM/HRSD/FSM, and adding CSM will make it easier for our users to go to the one-stop landing page to do their business with our departments. We are implementing CSM in-house. The CSM Implementation and Fundamentals courses we attended at K23 did not give any real-world examples for Higher Education customers.

We have some questions:

How are you using Consumers, Customers, Accounts, and Partners in CSM? I see plenty of examples of corporate settings supporting companies and their consumers. Can you share some examples of what data goes into Consumers, Customers, Accounts, and Partners? Are you using Consumers for all users, including internal and external users (i.e. parents and prospective students with personal self-registered accounts created via third-party IAM i.e., Okta)? Are you putting your department data in Customers? Are you using Accounts and Partners?

Regarding the Consumer / Consumer_User table and Sys_User table - are there any specific reasons why we should not use the Sys_User table to store Consumer data? In other words, will redirecting the Consumer-related fields to the Sys_User table rather than the Consumer table introduce any problems down the line?

Any info would be greatly appreciated!

[snowdev8]

I would think having a process to differentiate internal vs students would work best, ("Student login","Employee login") because you will run into issues with explicit roles.

[aaron_anderson]

This is an interesting approach since Consumers who are not Consumer Users cannot receive notifications from ServiceNow, even if they are configured to receive them because ServiceNow doesn't consider these actual users of the system.

If you changed all the users to Consumers and didn't create a Consumer, how did you account for the missing notifications?

[PeterdeBock VU]

hi Aaron,

I believe there is a misunderstanding. We only changed the reference in the Consumer record from "consumer_user" to "sys_user". From an architecture point of view, the Consumer record is now just an Appendix from the User. Similar as an HR Profile from an User. The difference between consumer_user and sys_user is that "consumer_user" will automatically receive the snc_external role. Normally this works for customers quite well, though Students are more than customers. Students make use of multiple IT Services (i.e. Office 365, Canvas, ...), Facilities, Library and so on. And, they certainly wil receive notifications.  Hopefully this clarifies it a bit.